This is a guest post by Rhianna Wisniewski. Rhianna is a communications strategist who helps researchers and institutions turn hard tech into stories and materials that drive understanding and impact. She has led communications across particle physics, AI, quantum science, semiconductors, and cybersecurity for some of the nation’s leading universities and national labs.
For decades, software dominated the tech landscape, but a recent shift toward solving physical-world problems has driven interest and investment to hard tech. These innovations, in areas such as AI, robotics, sustainable energy, and biotech, have the potential to drive change across industries or create entirely new markets.
Hard tech relies on scientific breakthroughs and engineering advancements, often integrating complex physical hardware with software and AI to create powerful systems.
Understandably, hard tech’s complexity makes communicating about it tough. To drive awareness and engagement, a hard tech company must bridge the gap between innovation and public understanding: an endeavor that requires a distinct approach to building clear, compelling communication and outreach.
Here, I’ll cover nine tactics that can help you clarify your messaging and engage your audience in your hardtech comms.
1. Start from Solutions
Scientists and engineers love to talk about how things work, and many companies want to focus on the technical superiority of their products.
But unless your audience is just as technical, that’s not the start line. Customers care about solving their problems faster, better, and easier. The narratives we build about a technology or product must resonate with decision makers and potential customers.
To do that, focus on demonstrating business impact. Explain the problem an offering solves, how it does this, and why it’s important: How will the product save time, reduce cost, or improve efficiency?
2. Highlight What’s Hard and Why it Matters
One of the coolest parts about communicating hard tech is its role in innovation.
It may have taken a long time to develop a product or system that solves a particular problem because the technology was previously thought unachievable or impossible.
Those communicating about hard tech should use this, explaining obstacles to progress and, at an accessible level, what breakthroughs or developments happened that made this innovation possible.
3. Demystify: Create Clarity through Comparisons
The goal of communicating hard tech innovations isn’t to explain exactly how the tech works, but to distill the essence of the process, using metaphors, analogies, and real-world examples that paint a picture for an audience of any level.
For example, to explain the behavior of superconducting electrons in high-temperature superconductors, you could compare electrons to ballroom dancers. You could explain that, rather than bumping into each other on a crowded dance floor, at low enough temperatures, those electrons suddenly pair up and glide together across the dance floor in unison, flowing smoothly without resistance.
These metaphors or comparisons are gifts you can give to reporters who can use them in their own stories, and to potential investors or customers to better understand the tech behind the product.
4. Build Trust with Transparency
Hard tech development is challenging. Timelines are long, risk can be high, and outcomes are uncertain.
Unlike software, which you can launch now and refine until it’s ready for market, hard tech innovations require physical components and all processes to be complete at launch. Before these physical products can be manufactured and introduced to market, they must be fully functioning, well-designed, tested, and optimized.
Share this all openly:
- It is important to acknowledge challenges and unknowns.
- Explain what success looks like and how you can derisk along the way.
Being upfront about these challenges can help to build credibility with investors, regulators, and potential partners, all of whom need to understand that the company is serious about scaling responsibly.
This is also great foundational content for establishing thought leadership. Consider developing op-eds and opinion pieces that share these challenges and lay out a roadmap for overcoming them or share a call to action to marshal the resources or changes necessary to do so.
5. Point to Progress to Demonstrate Momentum
Long development times, investment needs, and other challenges provide opportunities for communication at each turn. Tell the story at each stage to bring your audience along and to build product interest and brand engagement:
- Share research advancements and development milestones, demonstrating both the promise of the tech and the importance of the work done by the company.
- Communicate investments, partnerships, and agreements to build credibility – if these organizations are interested in the technology, perhaps others should be too.
- Announce test successes and clearance of regulatory hurdles to demonstrate the viability of the technology and build interest toward launch.
6. Provide Powerful Visuals
Communicating about hard tech to the media and key audiences requires visual aids. Providing powerful imagery with a press release boosts your chances of media pickup and public engagement:
- Infographics can help to explain complex products and processes, providing information in easier-to-understand, more digestible pieces.
- Videos provide an engaging experience that can help to foster authentic connections with your audience.
- Photos featuring researchers help to humanize the research, attracting attention and building trust and authenticity. Think about capturing or staging a researcher working on equipment, in protective gear in a lab, or a hand manipulating a magnified material.
7. Show and Tell
Physical technologies can look impressive, as do the machines, prototyping labs, and testing equipment that support their development.
Providing tours of innovation spaces creates an opportunity to enhance understanding about your product and brand. Combine the tour with an announcement or product launch to attract and secure media coverage.
Creating an effective tour does require careful communication planning:
- Identify a handful tour stop locations to give short, concise talking points about a company’s product, brand, collaborators, and partners, and to answer any stakeholder / media questions.
- Control background noise. There’s nothing worse than a leader trying to get their points across while fighting background noise from foot traffic and chatter.
- Consider strategically placing marketing banners, product images and infographics that help increase understanding of your innovation.
If an in-person opportunity is impractical or your media targets can’t attend, consider providing a virtual tour.
8. Cultivate your Spokespersons
It is important to find, train, and support spokespeople in any area, but the complexity of hard tech can translate to extra work in cultivating the right spokesperson.
Any spokesperson needs to be approachable and interested. But in research, and especially hard tech, a spokesperson needs to be able to explain the technology and the solution it provides to your aunt or next-door neighbor. That requires…
- Providing spokespeople with training: Media training, public speaking training, and presentation support can all be helpful.
- Developing key talking points and conducting rehearsals: Talking points should be at an appropriate level for the audience. Try to keep each sentence short (eight to 14 words) to give the best soundbites.
- Elevating internal talent: Identify researchers or engineers who have a significant understanding of the technology. Consider looking to earlier-career people who may have interest in leveraging outreach to boost their visibility and profile.
9. Generate a Human Story
One of the more challenging parts about communicating hard tech innovation can be centering humans in the innovation narrative. This can be exceptionally hard for companies with in-process innovations or those that are products or components of a larger system.
Find memorable human stories to help build a narrative around the innovation and brand. For example…
- Is there a story you can tell about how the innovation is helping to change a person’s life? If not, can you share the struggle faced by an individual or a community that this could help to solve?
- What’s the founder’s story? Why did that person start this company to solve this problem? What drives them?
- How did an early-career researcher get into this field? What do they hope they can accomplish during their career?
Great Communication Is a Competitive Advantage
Great hard tech communicators help people understand what a technology is and why it matters – to individuals, communities, and across the globe. That understanding is a key first step to all kinds of valuable business milestones: investment money, partnership agreements, customer orders, and employee applications.
In a world where technical depth can be a barrier, clear communication becomes a competitive advantage.
